


the only thing that i ask (love me mercilessly)

by akaparalian



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: BDSM, D/s, D/s relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-02-08 22:42:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1958838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows you too well; you try not to think about that, how in many ways he knows you better than anyone else ever has or likely ever will, because that's a dangerous thought in the same exact way that Jason Todd is a dangerous man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the only thing that i ask (love me mercilessly)

**Author's Note:**

> I have Serious Reasoning for why Tim Drake is quite possibly secretly the subbiest sub and could get a lot of good out of someone else realizing this and helping him out with it, and absolutely none of that is present in this fic. What _is_ present in this fic is a lot of porn. Uh, sorry? Incidentally, [this](http://8tracks.com/katpierce/i-want-to-feel-you-from-the-inside) fabulous mix is what I listened to on repeat while writing this. Er, finishing it. The first bit's been rotting on my hard drive for about a year now. Thank God _that's_ over.
> 
> Oh, and as far as warnings go: this fic portrays a D/s relationship featuring some pretty rough sex, mentions of bloodplay and knifeplay, etc., between two fully consenting adults. There's some initial under-negotiation of kink, but they talk it out eventually, and there's always an established safeword, so. Other than that… um, enjoy? (Title is from Hatefuck by the Bravery, because I'm... pretty much the worst.)

He is creating the evening spread, and he says you are beautiful, says you are the best part.

Your heart thumps in your breast even as you scoff; the notion is ridiculous, but just plausible enough to remind you that his words can twist you up so tightly, winding you into whatever shape he wants you to take, and that you always go gladly. You follow as he walks slowly to the dining room, plates on each arm balanced with skill born of almost religiously disciplined athleticism and strength, and you stop and wait until he has seated himself before you settle beside him. You are just close enough to feel his warmth in the air, to smell his cologne, but not close enough to so much as brush casually against him. Your seat is subtly lower than his, a scant few centimeters - enough to go unnoticed if you were to ever bring anyone else into this place, but _more_ than enough to remind you of the meaning behind this small incongruity.

He settles in and starts making the motions of the meal, tossing the simple napkin across his lap with careless ease and picking up his fork as though to begin - but he pauses, smiles a tiny, knowing smile that sends knife-sharp shivers down your spine, and sets the fork back down, reaching toward you instead. You lean forward eagerly, controlled enough in the motion that it doesn't seem wanton even as you press your cheek into the hand that's stroking softly at your face, but bold enough that his smile widens and takes on a distinctly dangerous shine.

"That's my little bird," he says softly - almost silently - knowing full well that you'll hear him anyway. He laughs quietly as you shiver again and bite your lip, turning away to eat and indicating you can do the same.

\---

Sometimes it's shockingly slow, gentle, wrapped in velvet and warmth and softly wet noises. Sometimes he murmurs lowly to you throughout, twining words into gasps and the lowest, deepest groans. Sometimes you don't even bother with any of the accoutrements - no collars, no ropes, no gags or blindfolds or threats or hair-pulling or clothespins or so much as a necktie on your wrists or a rough hand at the base of your neck. Nothing. Just the two of you, alone together and capable of shutting out everything else in the world, all the distractions and problems and irritations, and falling fully into your roles and your trust in one another.

And then sometimes he folds you over the most uncomfortable surface he can find and _uses_ you, fucks you long and hard until you can't remember anything - your own name, the days of the week, the sum of 2 + 2, what it felt like that night years ago when you hid out on a rooftop and watched Batman and Robin fly for the very first time - _anything_ except for the concepts of _please_ and _Sir_ and _more_.

It's nights like these - nights like tonight, where you both know exactly what's going to happen, the way it's going to be somewhere in between, with elements of each side of the binary - that you enjoy the most. Slow nights are nice, comforting; they remind you of exactly why you touch him as much as you do, not just when you're in the field together but as your Sir, your Dom. Rough nights are a whirlwind, and afterwards you enjoy the lingering burn more than you would have thought possible a few years ago. But these in-between nights are your favorite, because - because there's so much room to _do_ , so many things you can try because you're not going too gently to want to or too quickly to care.

There are just so many possible choices: things you've done before, things one or the other of you has discovered and wants to try, things made up either on the spot or in long hours alone, patrolling dark rooftops above darker streets. After all, that's how you got the idea to start experimenting with alternate uses for his knives or, once, a batarang you scrounged from the Cave, and that's when he realized he likes the way you look with blood on your lips almost as much as he likes the taste of it.

Right now, though, those things do not cloud your mind; all you can think of at this moment in time is the way he has you spread over the table, the remains of dinner knocked aside, your wrists pinned above your head by one hand worn tough by his line of work while the other pulls your hair and scrapes over your skin as he kisses you. You moan up into him and arch and thrust minutely into the air, but he hovers high enough above you that the motion's pointless, except to fully illustrate how much you want.

 _"Please,"_ you manage between gasps for breath, as he moves his lips to your throat, teeth raking possessively over your Adam's apple, hard enough to bruise but not, you think, nearly hard enough to _really_ hurt. Right now, that seems like a great tragedy, but then again you know that he always leaves your throat only marked, not damaged; he likes to hear you, after all.

"Little bird," he growls back at you, and you choke on a groan, " _baby_ bird-"

"Please," you pant again, your voice strangled, choked off. He usually keeps that name out of this - little bird, yes, that's common, but baby bird… no. He's very particular about what he calls you; very, very rarely, for example, does he call you Tim. Not when you're in public, around other people, and not when you're fucking. He only ever calls you Tim when you're alone, but not - _alone_ , when sex is not on either of your minds. Your name, out of everything, he keeps innocent. In public, you're "little brother" if he's trying to piss you off, or "Red" if you're in the field, or just a nod or gesture if you're with other people. All this is such that when he _does_ call you Tim, when you wake up together and he says "Good morning, Timmy," it feels like the most glowing endearment you could possibly imagine.

Because really, you can't ever picture Jason calling anyone "darling" in a _serious_ way.

He does call you other things, though - slut, babe, sweetheart. Once, particularly memorably, he went all night calling you Robin. Little bird seems to be a favorite. Whatever he settles on for any given night (or morning, or afternoon), you call him Sir; and isn't that indicative of the nature of this, that his need changes but _your_ need, your desire, your - loyalty, in whatever way this is loyalty, these things are constant.

He cages your shoulder in his teeth and bites, _hard_ , and you stop thinking.

"Please," you moan a third time - hell, you practically _mewl_ it, and you can feel the pleased smirk that curls his lips against your trapezius. "Please - Sir, I'll -" You choke on air when he bites you again, and you can _feel_ the skin break; you know the feeling pretty damn well at this point in your life, and you shudder and whine and high tone when he licks across the tiny wound, his tongue heavy and hot.

"You'll what?" he whispers into your shoulder, his free hand moving idly to run over your chest - he'd ripped the buttons clean off your shirt in pinning you to the table, and the smooth, thick red material is bunching around your elbows now, leaving plenty of room for tracing your scars with his fingertips and occasionally giving one of your nipples a hard, brief tweak.

"Anything," you gasp more than say, arching desperately up towards him, "anything, Sir," and when he brings his hips down to finally meet yours it’s the best kind of largesse, because you know he knows just how grateful you are, hears it in the sharp noise you make and the way you can't breathe for a long, heavy second before gasping upward.

He chuckles softly at you, the sound low and rich and just shaky enough that you know he's just as affected by you as you are him, though he does a better job of concealing it. And then suddenly he's gone, the loss of contact enough to make you keen. He laughs again, louder, surer, and you deliberately slump into the table, disguising your thrumming desire as bonelessness. There's a shift in the air when he takes that in; despite being able to see where he's gone, you know it the very instant he goes from teasing and almost playful to decided and entirely focused, and it makes you shudder down to the deepest part of yourself.

The part that excites you is, you don't know what his plan is. You never know, and that's the crux of it, in some ways.

"Come here," he says now, voice lowered to a growl, and you're instantly on your feet, shedding the remains of your shirt and crossing the distance between you in less time than it takes you to breathe in one long, slow, ragged breath. He's leaning up against a wall, and you hover just far enough away, waiting for - _something_. Your eyes trace over him, follow every exposed scar with familiarity (and there are too _many_ , but you try not to think about that), and you swallow the sound that tries to bubble up and out of your throat, because the thing that's been here with you since the beginning - the very, very beginning, even, the first time you knew of him - is how unequivocally _gorgeous_ he is. He's the kind of person who just - there was never any chance for you to not become devoted to him. Not like this. There is no way you could have seen him like this, standing in your home and holding you in place with just his presence and looking at you like somehow he needs you just as absolutely as you need him, and not fallen for him as hopelessly as you have.

This time the noise is impossible to contain and you sink to your knees, something in the back of your mind dimly enraged - it's not _fair_ , the way he's consumed you so fully, the way you're entirely certain you wouldn't be able to take living without him anymore, not as the same person you are now; if that came to pass it would change you so irrevocably that you don't think you'd still be _you_ , not the you that you are now. All of this, it's probably not safe, a potential weakness neither of you can afford, but you've managed to ignore that so far.

You're halfheartedly aware of your fingers scrabbling at his belt buckle, his pants, his fly, but the majority of your attention is focused on looking up at him, at his eyes, bright and intense, at the flush high on his cheekbones that assures you he's just as intent/just as addicted/just as far gone as you are.

The feeling of his cock on your tongue is familiar and the sound he makes when you suck kisses into the tip of it is maddeningly lovely. You can feel his hands smoothing over your hair with something very close to adoration before he grabs two handfuls and _pulls_ , and you know what that means - you lose track of the moments and your surroundings and everything except the suffuse heat that's consuming the entire room and the way it feels when he thrusts into your open throat and you forget to breathe.

When he tugs back on your hair, sharp but not hard, you come off with a filthy wet noise and your eyes flutter open before you even realize you'd closed them. Your mouth gapes open as you breathe, shallow and quick, and you can see the way his eyes are still needle-sharp and brilliant but also hazing over dark, and his cheeks are flushed crimson, and his breathing, too, is wrecked. You feel his fingers working through your hair - it's getting too long again, you somehow manage to think absently, you should get it cut soon, but then again you think he likes it better when it's long - and catching, sometimes, in the slight tangles at the ends.

"Good," he mumbles slightly incoherently while his fingers continue to gently run through your hair, "you're so good for me," and you close your eyes very consciously this time before you lean forward and nuzzle gently at his cock again. He's wet from both your saliva and his precome, and his dick twitches against your lips when you open them slightly and let it rest in your open mouth, sucking impossibly gently. His grip on you tightens and you bob your head farther down in response, your throat hardly even fluttering at the blunt hardness of him as you take his cock back down by inches, his grip on your hair slowly becoming more insistent as he fucks your mouth down onto him, his hips steadfastly still even as yours jutter forward to seek something to match the way it feels as he slides in and out of your mouth insistently.

You start to drift, slowly, the weight of his cock on your tongue and the relentless push and pull of his fingers in your hair tugging you slowly but surely into the back of your mind, into places where you don't need to think about anything that isn't relevant to this, right now. You don't consciously realize it's happening, really, but it relaxes you nevertheless, your shoulders sinking down with relief as your eyes glaze over just enough. He notices, surely, because he groans appreciatively and moves one hand out of your hair for just a moment to cup the side of your face possessively and trace his thumb over your cheek where it's hollow.

This time when your eyes slide closed it's calculated, the last thing you do before you give yourself over completely to this familiar rhythm, the warm feeling of him curled over you and the bright, sharp feeling of his fingers and the familiarity of all of it, even as you can barely contain your want and the fact that your cock is pressing insistently at your pants where they're still snug around your hips. Even as you close your eyes you can hear him and taste him and feel him all the more acutely, and you can feel the delicious rush of it through your veins as you give yourself over to him for the night.

\---

Sometimes you get to thinking about how it started. The problem is, even you aren't quite sure when it was that you stopped thinking about yourself and him as being separate. These days, you can't seem to think of the two of you apart, and that's a problem, that's a weakness, but you don’t care, you can't care. It's been years since he wasn't slinking around in the back of your mind, tightly coiled and foreboding in the sense that inside your head, you know you're not going to be able to forget about him, not ever. He's always going to be there in the crevices and corners of your thoughts, has been sneaking into your brain like smoke since the first time you saw him - the first time you so much as heard of him - and now there's no way you're going to be able to get him back out.

The thing is: Jason Todd has seen all the worst things the world has to offer and come back from them. He has been deconstructed and painstakingly reassembled in the same breath; he has been to the bottom of every ditch and the height of every cliff, and he's still around. The thing is: you aren't like that. You're just now coming to the end of the long downward slide, the path you put yourself on as an impassioned and idealistic and precocious child slowly running itself into the ground at last.

The thing is: you taste him in the back of your throat like motor oil and ashes, sometimes, when you aren't even thinking about it, and you can't help but realize every time you see the dim outline of him on the Gotham skyline that he's so beautiful the way he's built himself back up in red steel and gunmetal. The thing is: you're strong, but you aren't as strong as he is, not yet. The thing is: you want him - in the dark part of your heart, you want him to pull you into a back alley somewhere and fucking tear you apart.

The thing is, the thing is: one day it finally _happens_.

Not like that, nothing so dramatic. Or, rather, nothing that will end up in the paper; people ripping into each other in the hallways of shitty apartment buildings, that's nothing, but vigilantes at each other's throats in the dark veins of the map are still front page news in this city. But you do end up tracking him down one night, at a safehouse on the fringes of the Narrows, where he's just far enough from the thick of the bad parts of things to stay under the Bat's radar. Not yours, though; you've tracked him here carefully, spent months and months sketching out a rough map of his activities in this city in the ever-working part of your memory.

The hell of it is, you don't know _why_ you've been tracking him so relentlessly lately, barely even remembering to make sure he doesn't realize what you're doing because you're so intent on _doing_ it, until you show up in the hallway outside his apartment. You're pretty sure he actually rents out the whole floor - a little safer that way, a little more secluded - but there's only one _officially_ under his alias in the landlord's books. In hindsight, breaking into the office downstairs to snoop around was probably overkill for something that isn't even a real Red job, just some weird Jason Todd-related hobby you seem to have picked up, but whatever. It's helping now, because you're guessing this is the apartment he actually lives in.

You knock on the door, sharp and loud, and it turns out you're not wrong; it swings open onto Jason's face, already hard and guarded and only becoming more so when you smile coolly at him for a lack of anything else to do.

"The fuck do you want?" he grumbles, but - and you're still guessing a little, because no matter how much you learn about him and how long you've known him now, it seems like he can always surprise you - he doesn't sound actually incensed, just a bit annoyed, and unsure why you've followed him here.

"Let me in," you suggest instead of actually answering, some sort of heady energy flowing into your words as something in the way he scowls at your words sets your brain working. You still don't know why you're here. You don't know why you're here, but you think you might be just about to figure it out.

He steps aside without a word, every edge of his body screaming derision, but despite the fact that it was your suggestion to go inside, you don't move. Instead you stare at him, study the tight knit of his eyebrows and the usual scowl warping the lower half of his face, and try to decide how to get what you want from him.

You look at the way his muscles are coiled tense and tight under his loose, slightly ratty clothes, and you decide in a split second that maybe being straightforward will work better than mind games here. You're both Bats, sure, both used to having someone fuck with your head to get what they want from you, but this is different, this is something for just the two of you - _that's_ why you're here. Besides, you don't want to think about Bruce in conjunction to this, at all, not even remotely, not even by using the same mental tricks and traps as he might to get something from Jason Todd.

So you rock forward just slightly, shifting your weight more solidly into his sphere of control, and you look him right in the eyes, and you say, "I need you to do something for me."

He stares at you like you're crazy, and, well, from his perspective it probably looks like you are - he must assume this is work-related, so it makes absolutely zero sense for you to want to discuss it out here in the hall instead of inside like you'd originally asked. "Why the fuck would I do something for you, baby bird?" he asks shortly, eyes darting around suspiciously even though he knows even better than you do that the rest of this floor is completely vacant.

You smile at him, wicked and sharp, and you see exactly when it hits him that this isn't - this isn't _you_ , or at least it isn't you in any way he's ever seen you. This isn't you on Bat business, certainly, and he must see that now, because he leans forward just slightly, like he doesn't even realize he's doing it, puts himself just enough closer to you that you know you've really got his attention now.

"Maybe there's something in it for you, too," you say, and you finally walk in the door.

It's rough, that first night. Partly that's because you don't really talk about things as much as you maybe should have - he knows enough to ask you, half-joking, about a safeword, but other than that there isn't much talking that isn't directly tied to the scene. Then again, partly it's because you've been circling around him for most of your life, drawn in tight in one way or another, and all that focus seems to come boiling out of you and boiling out of him, too, now that both of you have the chance to use it.

It's rough, but it's also much less drawn out than it will be later. Both of you are on a short fuse with each other after all these years, and apparently that doesn't just apply to normal tempers and tensions but to this, too. He more or less throws you down on the nearest flat surface - his kitchen table - and starts right in on you without preamble. In a way it's disappointing, because - well, there are a lot of things you like just as much as you like getting fucked, and you've been hoping in the back of your mind to someday get into those things with him for a while. But it's also fantastic, better and brighter and more intense than anything you've ever had before, because not only is he unafraid to pull your hair until your back arches and push you until you go where he wants you and bite down into your shoulder until he leaves bruises that you know you'll be feeling for days, but you _know_ him. Not perfectly, and not without boundaries, but you know him, and he knows you, in a raw, aching way that makes everything about the feeling of him inside you and his fingers in your hair and his bruises on your skin so much better.

Besides, you're pretty confident that you'll have time to get into the other things you like later, and pretty confident that he'll like them just as much, and pretty confident that you'll take a vicious pleasure in finding all the things _he_ wants and fulfilling them to the fullest extent of your abilities. And your abilities, here as much as anywhere, are not lacking.

You don't go home that night; you don’t leave in the morning, either. You have to patrol the next night, so you do finally leave just before dusk, but in the intermittent time he fucks you once more and you get down on your knees for him for the first time. Not purely for the sake of kneeling - that will come later, you know this even at the time, and it sends a thrill up your spine to think about, but - this time it's about sucking him off, and you're so incredibly okay with that, too.

By the time you finally leave the apartment, you smell like nothing more than you smell like Jason Todd and sex, and you stop briefly at one of your own boltholes to shower. Somehow you don't think it'll do much good, because there are mouth-shaped bruises up and down your neck and while you're confident the both of you were careful enough that you'll still be able to do your job, you are a bit sore and it's hard to hide the way that affects your movements without making yourself more uncomfortable. Frankly, you aren't even going to try; it's an insult to Bruce's abilities to think he won't figure the two of you out at some point anyway, and you might as well be up-front about it, in a roundabout Bat way. Not that it's any of his business, but then again, you and Jason are his business, so maybe it is.

At any rate, you'll feel better after showering because at least then you'll know for certain you aren't going to walk into the Batcave with Jason Todd's dried come on your body.

\---

The next time you open your eyes, you're in the bedroom; he's picked you up and carried you, your body cradled against his bridal-style, his arms strong and possessive around your lax frame. He drops you onto the bed from a few inches up and you bounce, smiling beatifically up at him even as your eyes jolt open at the surprise.

You lie there and watch as he makes quick work of his shirt, and then his shoes, socks, pants, his briefs. You allow yourself the indulgence of watching intently the way his muscles work in the dim glow from the lamp on the bedside table and the ambient city light filtering in through the window, the way spider-web scars paint a map of the city across his chest. Once his clothes are gone, he watches you right back, the two of you staring across the spare few feet of air between you, probably seeing the same things: you imagine, and maybe it's ridiculous to think so, but you imagine he finds the same kind of half-hollow beauty in you that you find in him. You imagine that, in the back of his mind, there's been some feeling all along that matches the feeling in the back of yours. You imagine what it would be like to touch him right now, and you reach toward him to find out for sure.

You have to sit up to reach him, though he does lean forward into your touch, his clever fingers reaching for your belt and then your button and then your zipper and then he's pulling your pants and your underwear down all at once and you shiver to be exposed to the cool air. Your hands don't stop moving, though, roving almost worshipfully over his chest and tracing the familiar paths of the scars from a million battles he's been fighting since the day he was born, and he grins at you somewhere between approving and rough.

With the both of you finally naked, he presses down into the cradle of your body until you're flat against the bed again, and you don't bother to hide the way you shudder and rock up into the presence of something, seemingly _ages_ since the last time there was something, to press your cock against. He chuckles; he's leaning over you so much that you can't see his face, but you can hear him, dark and smooth, in your ear, and you take that to mean you can do it again, shifting your hips slightly so that you can at least attempt to rut against his thigh, a little bit crazed with it because you've been hard since the two of you sat down to eat.

He lets that go on for a minute - and you can feel the weight of him watching you, can hear the way a hitch of breath against your ear reveals that he likes seeing you like this, when you'll take anything from him even if it's just his solid presence - but it's not long at all before there are fingers clutching tight at your hips to keep them still. You whimper before you can catch the sound and keep it in, and he doesn't laugh this time, but you can almost hear how pleased he is with that anyway.

"Easy, little bird," he tells you, voice admirably steady from just behind your head as his weight bears down on you, and you turn your head into his neck to stifle a frustrated little noise. He hears it, though - you knew he would, and you wanted him to, wanted him to know how much you need… whatever it is he's planning on providing for you.

Sometimes you still like to remind him that you were the one to come to him, after all; his need matters just as much as yours does, and the whole _point_ in a way is that he knows what to give you before you even know to long for it, and also that your needs are often met by just fulfilling his, but sometimes you give him a little push in the right direction, and usually it works out for both of you.

This, apparently, is no exception, because his fingers tighten on your hips and he rears back to sit on your thighs and look down at you, eyes bright and hungry. There are going to be long, slender bruises on your hips in the morning, you can feel it, and the longer he just sits there and watches you and clutches you with all the strength your line of work requires, the more you think about that fact, imagining what those bruises are going to look like on your skin, already relishing the way they're going to ache when you touch them. Some of this must show on your face, because he tightens his grip even farther for a split second before he finally lets go. (That, or he just knows you too well; you try not to think about that, how in many ways he knows you better than anyone else ever has or likely ever will, because that's a dangerous thought in the same exact way that Jason Todd is a dangerous man.)

You keen a little at the loss of his grip, and especially when he takes his weight off of you and kneels between your legs instead, but you're a lot less upset when he promptly takes your legs in hand and folds you in half like it's nothing, sliding your legs over his shoulders so that his hands are free to spread your cheeks without preamble. You're trembling, you realize suddenly, and you mutter a choked-off " _please_ " before you can stop yourself.

"Please what?" he asks immediately, just like you knew he would, just like he always does, and this - the talking - is actually sort of your favorite part, so you tell him.

"Please," is all you can manage at first, craning your neck slightly to look up at him, and then, "Sir, _please_ ," and then finally, "fuck me, please, please, I need to feel you," trailing off into a babble when he leans down a little awkwardly to kiss you rough and sloppy, commanding. It's so good it makes you squirm a little, and you can feel his lips curl up just slightly in response. You love that, love knowing that you affect him, too, just as he affects you, and it makes your toes curl when he groans low into your mouth.

He pulls away from your lips and slips the tip of a finger into you at the same time and you keen loudly. It's dry, and it burns a little, but since it's just the one and he's being pretty gentle it's a good burn instead of something you'd shy away from. Your eyes slip closed again as you twitch your hips just slightly, relishing the feel of even just his finger - partly because it's something to fill you, partly because it's _him_ , and even now you won't look to closely at just how the percentages of that are split.

The finger's gone in the next instant, though, and with your eyes closed the sounds of him rustling around for something behind you and then the promising _click_ of the bottle of lube are amplified. The anticipation has you squirming still, but the first slick touch of his fingers shocks you into utter peace, your back arched off the bed as you breathe heavily for a long moment before sinking back onto the mattress.

He opens you up efficiently, but thoroughly; sometimes he'll spend hours doing this, just fingering you open and seeing exactly how long it takes for him to make you come (spoiler: not very long at all, most of the time, because he's very, very good at figuring out how to push your buttons, and that's not just true when you're on the job; it carries over to this as well. Also, when Jason Todd puts his mind to something, no matter what it is, he tends to get what he wants, and sometimes that something is you). But tonight he's much more cursory, and this clearly isn't his end goal, so you just lie back and enjoy it. The angle of his arm's a bit awkward with your legs still flung over his shoulders, but he makes it work, and anyway before too long he's pulling out long slick fingers and wiping them clean on your thigh, sending a thrill of anticipation down your spine.

When he pushes in it's like your whole world tilts a little; it's not damaging or painful, really, but it's certainly not gentle, and you cry out at the sensation, your eyes opening to a dizzying view of the ceiling that sort of rocks every few seconds when one of his first, experimental thrusts jostles you. He's not really in the business of waiting to make sure you're comfortable before he starts moving - that's not the nature of this thing, after all - but that's honestly part of what you like, what you need, so anyway it doesn't matter.

He starts moving in earnest, the snap of his hips and the dull rhythmic noises a filthy-wet experience that sort of surrounds you, and you let yourself relax into it, your body going supple and easy in perfect counterpoint to the heaviness of your breathing and the way your nerves are not so much singing as screaming a million things at you all at once. It's perfect, it's so perfect, but it's not quite enough - you take a moment to consider, in a strangely calm fashion given how out-of-your-mind wild you are at the moment, that maybe it's not _ever_ going to be quite enough; then again, that doesn't mean it can't try to be - and you know what you want isn't the most important thing, you know he's doing his best to give you what you need even more that just what you desire, you _know_.

You ask anyway.

" _Please,_ " you manage one last time, and you can just see the way his face clouds over with determination, the kind of burning tenacity that you think he could probably use to raze cities, you know, when he's not directing it at you. And then he somehow presses himself into you impossibly farther - not just his cock, but the whole weight of him, bearing down on you unrelentingly, and it's most all you can do to remember to breathe.

\---

It took you a while to get to where you are now. For one thing, you both had an edge to burn off; it took weeks for either of you to reach the point where you wanted much more than rough and insistent and _now_. Eventually you got to the point where you were able to be alone and talk about this, this _thing_ without sort of immediately needing to rip each other's clothes off. Of course, you know him and you know yourself well enough to know you both could have resisted that if you wanted to, but that's just the thing - why want to?

So it's a few weeks in before you get into much more than rough sex and that one, brief discussion of your safeword (Voorhees; it had taken him a gratifyingly short amount of time to recognize the _Friday the 13th_ reference, and he'd laughed for a moment before ducking in to lay bruises across your collarbone). After about two and a half weeks of you tracking him down to whichever of his several shitty apartments he's sleeping in that particular night and slipping in the door right behind him, he breaks out a pair of solid, thick leather cuffs that to this day practically make you weak in the knees just thinking about them. A week after that, he puts you on your knees on the weirdly waxy linoleum in one of his outdated kitchens and keeps you there all night, until you fall asleep like that, your back perfectly straight and your dick half-hard pretty much the whole time; in the morning, he presses you down flat on the floor and holds your hips in tightly curling fingers and whispers the filthiest fucking shit in your ear until you come all over yourself with just the slightest brush of his hands.

He makes you coffee after that, and eggs and some bacon that looks mostly edible, and you have a conversation about some of the finer details of this Thing that you've come to think of with a capital T. For instance: you've mostly settled into calling him Sir, and he confirms that for you, makes it permanent. You tell him there are just a few things you won't do, things that make you truly uncomfortable, just so he already knows, to prevent you having to safeword out of them later if he should think to try them - keep the bodily fluids to blood and semen, you tell him, and no fire, and also it's fine, you say plainly, if he wants to fuck you without a condom (he's been so good about that that it's really quite surprising, given the nature of this), but he has to make sure he's clean first because you'd really rather not explain to Batman that you're out of action because of an STD. In return, he tells you he's probably not going to ever break out anything like whips or, especially, canes - and you can read everything in the way he hesitates so slightly on that word, and you get it, you do, so you don't say anything, you just nod.

Slowly but surely, you both start bringing more and more to the table - for instance, you mostly stop actually using the table for sex. You transition to his bed, where it's easier for him to cuff you to the headboard or spread you out widely until he can touch all of you at once. Slowly but surely, you get used to the full brunt of the effects of this Thing - the way Bruce, and then Dick, and then Damian look at you differently, the way Barbara tries to hide the fact that she's looking at you differently, the way Alfred does a really good job at hiding the fact that he's looking at you differently behind slipping the same baked goods he's been giving you for years into your hands whenever you show up at the manor and smiling at you small and serene. There's also the fact that it's a rare day when there isn't a satisfying, comfortable ache in your muscles, your bones, the planes of your back, and there are always, always fresh bruises trailing down the salient parts of your body, and these days they aren't even all work-related.

Slowly but surely, these things become routine in the best possible way.

\---

You hardly even notice your own orgasm coming, possibly because you've been teetering on the precipice for so long. Before you really process what's going on, your come is striping your stomach and his and you're choking on his name, and he's slowing the rhythm of his hips for a little while to gentle you through it. There are soothing hands tracing down your sides and the bits of your thighs he can reach, and you squeeze your eyes closed for a long moment and enjoy the gorgeous overstimulation of the whole thing.

Then you take a deep breath and open your eyes and nod up at him, and he smiles back down at you, mercury-quick, before you slip back down into the fullest extent of your subspace and he starts back up where he left off.

It's funny; you can see it, when he gets really, really close, much better than you'd been able to see it when it was you. But you can tell from the way the muscles in his neck tense just so and his eyes take on a special kind of glaze, and you shakily take one of the hands that had been clutching at the sheets - because it's _so much_ , especially after you've just come and now you're ridiculously sensitive, but it's so, so good - and bring it up to clutch at his shoulder instead, your nails scraping red trails on his taut skin, because you know him almost as well as he knows you, at least in this way.

And you're right: he shudders into you, his back bowing into a ridiculously beautiful stretch as his hips jutter once more and then finally still, and you can _feel it_ ; it's been months since the last time you used a condom in any capacity and you still haven't really gotten used to feeling it like that, and you both lie there for a while panting and ignoring the idle urge to wipe the sweat from your brows in favor of slowly winding down together, melting gradually into a more and more comfortable positions until you're just a jumble of sweaty, sated limbs.

You drift for a while, not quite asleep, but dozing slightly, with the gentle, fond, repetitive motion of his hands stroking through your hair lulling you to the borderlands between wakefulness and real sleep. Soon enough, though, he's moving to separate your sticky limbs before you can dry stuck together and then padding off quietly in the direction of the bathroom.

Honestly, that's the part you expected the least when this all started - how gently he treats you when you're done. That first time, you weren't quite expecting "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" - though you wouldn't have been _that_ surprised, really, if that had been what you got - but you certainly weren't expecting him to be as good about it as he was, as he still is. Even on the nights that are more or less vanilla, like this one, when you don't really need much in the way of aftercare, he always cleans you up so nicely and the washcloth is never cold, always just warm enough to be soothing, and you just - you're constantly being surprised by Jason Todd, and even months and months into this thing you've got going he continues to astound you just like he always has. Just, well. Differently than he astounded you when you were a little kid.

Sure enough, he's back only a few minutes later, his absence perforated by the sound of the tap running in the other room and then shutting off with a slight groan that seems inherent to the age of the pipes. Your head's still thrown back against the pillows at the base of the headboard, so you don't see him so much as you feel the way the bed dips and then the soft swipe of terrycloth against your stomach, and you sigh contentedly and reach out to stroke the crown of his head before you can stop yourself.

You crane your head to look down at him, and he's smiling at you, easy and lax but with just a hint of that bite that's so uniquely his, and you can't help but smile back. You feel like you should say something, maybe, but you're not sure what, so you just lie there and enjoy the sensations as he finishes cleaning you up.

When he's done, he gets up again to put the washcloth back, and you roll over onto your side, really flirting with sleep now. You're sure, though, that you should wait for him to get back, sure that you should - _say_ something, because the thing is, tonight was good. It was so good, and not that it's not _always_ good, not that you don't spend most of your days now with a pleasant ache in your bones, but it was good, and you're grateful, because this is what you knew you needed the first time you came to him. This isn't the only thing - sometimes you need it a lot harder than this. Often you need it a lot harder than this. But he knows it, when it's one of those times, and he knows on nights like this that you need it a little gentler, and he knows how to get you everything you need.

You're glad you knew what you were getting into, and you're glad you picked the right person to come to, and you're so, so grateful that he shows you this part of him that's so intensely protective and nurturing and a million other things you think most people don't ever learn about him. It feels like a secret, every time he takes care of you like this, and you're hyper-aware of that, and you relish it.

So when he gets back, settles into bed behind you with a sigh and throws a leg possessively over yours, you roll over as best you can to face him, and you smile. "Thank you," you say quietly into the space between your mouths, and you hesitate for the barest half a second before adding, "Sir."

He doesn't react, not really, but there's something about the set of his eyebrows and the slight uptick of his mouth that tells you he understands more or less exactly what you mean, these tiny little signs you've learned to read off of his face like they're in bold twelve-point font. Then, finally, he moves to stroke you very carefully on the cheek, his hands ridiculously gentle for someone who makes a dubious career out of vigilante justice, and he smiles, small but intensely bright.

"Baby bird," he sighs, and you drift off to sleep just like that.


End file.
